Horner and Ma

George Horner, a 90 year-old musician who survived from concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, performed with celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma in front of an audience of around one thousand people at Boston’s Symphony Hall. 


Deported with his family-that was killed in Nazi concentration camps- 21 year-old Horner composed many pieces for piano and accordion while in prison. Fittingly, two of these pieces were performed during the concert in Boston. The proceeds from which were donated to the Terezin Music Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the work of artist and musicians who were killed by the Nazis. 


Before the performance, Ma and Horner met and embraced each other during a brief technical test. Ma thanked Horner for his help with the Foundation that took its name from the city of Terezin, the so-called “camp of the artists,” where Hitler forced the detainees to pretend to live in normal conditions, knowing that their final destination was Auschwitz.


“He is an extraordinary link to the past-said Mark Ludwig, organizer of the concert and director of the foundation-but it was difficult to ask Horner to perform pieces laden with such difficult memories.” Yet Horner, a retired doctor that today lives near Philadelphia, immediately accepted the offer to participate in a cause with such a noble mission. 


Ma also shared the aim of this concert in hoping that events like this are able to inspire people towards a better future. “I grew up with the words “never again”-said the cellist, born ten years after the end of the WWII and of the revelation of the terrible plight of the Holocaust- and I find inconceivable that there are people that say he Holocaust never existed. George Horner is a living contradiction of what those people are saying. For me he is a grand hero, a source of enormous inspiration, and I believe that he survived-in part-thanks to music, that it was able to fill in the empty space left by made.”